Mack C. Shelley - US grants

Education Research Meets the Gold Standard: Statistics and Mathematics Applications in Science, Reading, and Research Methodology

We intend to conduct a major international conference addressing the articulation, or lack thereof, between the "gold standard" for federally-supported education research and research in science education and reading. Recent federal legislation places greater emphasis within education research on quantification, as well as the use of randomized trials and the selection of valid control groups. The fundamental issue for conference participants to address is the extent to which the canons of federal research connect with the current and likely future conduct of education research. We intend that this conference will sustain and expand the dialogue between the statistical community and those who implement the education research agenda, through a discussion of whether and how to implement the new standards for statistical work in the field of education research. The primary intellectual contribution of the conference is to provide the opportunity for an exchange of views among leading statisticians specializing in education issues, and education research specialists in science education and literacy. The products of the conference will be disseminated throughout the education research community, and should result in improved research methodology, more effective program evaluation and implementation, and more positive outcomes for students and for instructional and administrative education personnel. Among the topics and research methods we intend to cover are hierarchical linear models, structural equation models, geographic information systems, data mining, meta-analysis, neural networks, time series, decision trees/CART, and Bayesian data analysis.

This conference is meant to help inform the national debate over the role of scientific standards for research in education, particularly as those research standards are influenced by statistical methods and theory. We wish to ensure that this conference gives rise to sustained dialogue regarding both established and innovative dimensions of the education research agenda. The conference will bring together researchers in statistics, education, and related disciplines to discuss the dramatically changing context of contemporary education research. Standards for acceptable research in this key area are affected greatly by the recent creation of the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education. The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the Education Sciences Reform Act (H.R. 3801) reconstituted the standards for federal support for research and the dissemination of education research findings. This major legislation has established an approach to "scientifically valid education research," enshrined in what is referred to as the "gold standard." The chief societal impact of the conference is to provide stronger guidance for researchers and practitioners addressing critical aspects of national education policy.

The Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering in collaboration with educational colleagues is planning to develop new and reformulated curricula in computer, electrical, and mechanical engineering. The project is titled Vertical Integration of Computer, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Education, or VIE, which is symbolic, as the word vie means to invite, challenge, strive, compete. This project will invite and challenge a number of constituencies to work together to improve student learning through integrated programs and experiences. The fundamental premise of the proposed project is integration: curriculum integration, integration of research and teaching, integration of interdisciplinary information, and integration through community. This project proposes the learning stream model with multifaceted educational objectives, including: curriculum integration through the learning stream model, application of the learning stream model to inquiry-based learning, integrated information resources to support interdisciplinary learning streams, and extension of the learning stream model to precollege engineering education. The goal of VIE is to create a connected learning environment, in which college students see connections across courses and disciplines, pre-college students see connections to engineering, undergraduates see connections to research and practice, and students and teachers at all levels benefit from the interaction and mentoring that takes place in the process of discovery.

Intellectual Merit
The VIE project introduces the novel concept of a learning stream and defines the learning stream model for an engineering program. The learning stream model naturally bridges research and inquiry with teaching, through problem-based learning. A component of this project will apply a new resource model to develop an integrated set of educational resources for a learning stream. This facilitates interdisciplinary learning streams. In addition to connecting students across courses in a learning stream, the VIE project proposes an outreach component to connect graduate, undergraduate, precollege students.

Broader Impacts
The model itself is expected to be a reference for any engineering program. The goal of re-shaping the curriculum is to better prepare engineering students and graduates to learn and apply knowledge. As a result, it will serve many sectors having a stake in the quality of engineering graduates. The model is designed to close the knowledge gaps between courses. The model can be extended to enhance educational opportunities for all students, including precollege, women, and minority students. The model will help faculty teach differently, and it will help students learn differently. It has the potential to change the social fabric of the academic environment.

Iowa State University (ISU) and Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) are partnering on this project to increase the number of students graduating with a bachelor's degree in engineering at ISU and the number of students in STEM areas of study at DMACC. Retention is being increased by a new learning community model, called a learning village or meta-community. The learning village model incorporates various learning communities as well as service learning projects for engineering students in their second and third years of study. First-year and gateway engineering courses are being reviewed to better engage students, to provide flexibility, and to support transfer students. The ACCESS program makes gateway courses available through distance education. Student-centered advising broadens the diversity of students enrolled in engineering and makes students aware of the various paths to successfully completing an engineering degree, including transfer from a community college. ISU Extension is a partner on the project to develop the STEM TEC (Talent in Every County) initiative.

This project is awarding scholarships to academically talented and financially needy students and is supporting the scholars through a variety of structures and programs. Women and students from underrepresented groups are being especially targeted for support. Student scholars are enrolled in eight cohorts. Four of the cohorts are composed of traditional students and four are composed of transfer students. The students are enrolled in an engineering discipline and simultaneously in an Engineering Leadership Program, in keeping with the National Academy of Engineering's vision for the engineer of 2020. Through this program, the engineering leaders of tomorrow are being recruited and developed. There is significant industry and institutional support for the program.

Engineering - Electrical (55)

The project is exploring a unique education paradigm that systematically integrates software engineering practice into a series of embedded systems courses. It addresses the need to educate students in using software engineering methods in complex embedded software projects, a topic that is not addressed adequately in either software or embedded systems courses. The project involves introductory-, intermediate- and advanced-level embedded systems courses. The most important software engineering methods appropriate to each level are introduced in the corresponding course and the software engineering practices are integrated into the course laboratories and projects. Commonly used software engineering tools will be introduced along with embedded systems development environments. The project will improve student learning and teaching effectiveness in both areas. Furthermore, a short course abstracted from the materials is benefiting other engineering disciplines that develop domain-specific embedded systems. The teaching materials are being designed so that they can be re-organized to serve students and engineers from other disciplines to meet their need for training in Software Engineering. The evaluation effort, under the guidance of an expert from the campus's institute for studies of education, is using validated sample survey instruments, institutional data on achievement and growth, focus groups, and individual interviews to monitor the project's effectiveness, impact, and unexpected outcomes. Investigators are disseminating their methods and results through their website, journal and conference venues, and specialty outlets, including the Shared-Software Infrastructure Program and the Field-tested Learning Assessment Guide. Broader impacts include the dissemination of the material, including their assessment tools, and their outreach to other engineering disciplines.

This CPATH award supports a curriculum initiative to inject computational thinking capability into computer science and gerontology disciplines at the local and state levels with a plan to conduct, assess, and to analyze the outcomes to guide future nationwide efforts. The proposal consists of three major components: Developing a new interdisciplinary curriculum track in Gerotechnology culminating in an undergraduate certificate; Transforming the existing SmartHome Laboratory at Iowa State University into an open project platform, so that experiments and projects on the Smart Home can be run from remote locations; and Establishing an open source community on software based on service-oriented architecture to support collaborative projects. The new track is strongly supported by the latter two components to ensure that the proposed curriculum is supported by meaningful materials, examples, and projects and that enable community building between disciplines, stakeholders, and institutions.

Intellectual Merit: The proposed work introduces a new pedagogy that is interdisciplinary, incorporates the recent developments in multiple disciplines, and focuses on hands-on and practical experience. The SmartHome Laboratory allows students to make lasting contributions to real and meaningful applications and to collaborate with students from other colleges and backgrounds. Computer science students will be able to demonstrate their computational thinking competences through human-centered learning opportunities. Students from outside computer science should have opportunities to work in teams in order to fully utilize modern technologies that have begun to transform their professions. A competent team of experts in the fields and experienced practitioners has been assembled to ensure success of the project. The main national impact should be the creation a model of a program for a tightly focused application, gerontechnology, a new collaborative program model for the nation.

Broader Impact: In addition to the main goal of injecting computational thinking capabilities into the curriculum, the investigators plan proactive recruiting and support of a diverse group of students, including those with disabilities, females, and underrepresented minorities. The proposed curriculum provides stronger incentives and better accommodations to these groups while disseminating exciting, immediately applicable, cutting edge technologies. The results from learning and project activities can be disseminated immediately to the aging population and people with disabilities through service learning courses and family outreach extension.

Interdisciplinary(99) This project is developing a new innovative program to develop future faculty in engineering with practical training to be more effective educators. The core of the proposed program is based on efforts in a newly developed and popular program called the Minor in Engineering Studies (MES). The project creates teams of effective faculty to train, mentor, and evaluate a select group of graduate students to teach classes in the MES program. The combination of intensive mentoring by well trained faculty and instruction in current effective teaching techniques ensures that graduate students are poised to become top educators in engineering.
The MES program is designed and implemented to provide technological literacy to non-engineering students. The main objective of the MES program is providing the concepts and ideas of engineering and technology to students with non-technical backgrounds. The MES uses a contextual approach (e.g., learning electrical engineering by investigating how a cell phone works)that makes engineering relevant to the daily lives of non-engineering students. The classes are non-mathematical and are focused on applications, conceptual understanding, and big-picture items. The classes have no prerequisite and build on high school algebra. Effective and successful faculty participate in the program as representatives of the best resources in providing guidance, mentorship, and special lectures to help strengthen graduate educators' teaching skills and help them become more effective educators. The project models the effective use of expertise and training to ensure that future generations of well trained engineers and non-engineers have an understanding of engineering technology.

Intellectual Merit: Strengthening the Professoriate at Iowa State University (SPISU) strengthens and diversifies the professoriate by creating a community of scholars who focus on integrating broader impacts efforts into their research enterprise. SPISU brings together campus programs, many NSF funded, that share the mission of broadening participation of under-represented minorities and women in STEM fields, with the goal of networking, integrating, and sustaining the efforts of individual and multiple-investigator projects. The community also includes post-doctoral scholars and advanced graduate students mentored by faculty as they develop the awareness and skills needed to develop plans for broader impacts to complement their research skills.

The project supports these primary outcomes: (1) the creation of protocols and policies that use a faculty member's broader impact work in annual performance evaluations and the promotion and tenure process. The goal is to develop evaluation tools and protocols that will add value to ISU processes and can be implemented at other universities. (2) Through SPISU, faculty develop research based broader impact programs that are based on the scholarship of best practices. This raises the intellectual strength of broader impact plans that faculty integrate into their research programs.

Broader Impacts: The proposed activity focuses on developing a new generation of faculty who integrate their broader impacts efforts with their research enterprise. The participating programs, which include ISU ADVANCE, Iowa AGEP, and other programs focused on K-grey education and diversity efforts benefit from a new group of collaborating faculty. Developing new P&T protocols and procedures to include evaluation of broader impacts work also increases the level of effort that faculty put toward broader impacts. Finally, as post-doctoral scholars and advanced graduate students are included in the SPISU activities, they will be trained for faculty positions as they develop broader impact plans that are based on the scholarship of best practices. Partnering with ISU ADVANCE, Iowa AGEP, and the Math Alliance, will ensure that women and under-represented minorities are actively recruited to participate in SPISU activities.

The project proposes a research study and a workshop, both aimed at bringing together theory, practice, and evidence-driven discussion. It will be guided by two objectives: (1) understanding faculty engagement, and (2) strengthening faculty engagement. These will be considered in relation to institutional environment support and the capacity for transformative research. Key activities will include an integrated analysis of faculty and institutional data within the context of a self-determination theory of motivation, and a holistic envisioning of academic research careers by experts and stakeholders. A distinctive exploratory aspect of the research study is the use of statistical modeling to investigate questions that have not been addressed before in large-scale surveys related to faculty satisfaction and retention.

The study will include a focus on career-life balance to better understand faculty engagement and persistence in academic STEM careers. The study team will plan and convene a workshop to synthesize recent work encompassing career life balance and broader impacts (BI) infrastructure, share and stimulate promising practices, and develop recommendations for institutional action. The project will influence institutional opportunities to enhance faculty engagement, career life balance, gender equality in STEM careers, and BI infrastructure. The use of COACHE data may inform cross-institutional policies and practices to support faculty and potentially benefit hundreds of colleges and universities. Open access to research and workshop results will be provided using Iowa State's Digital Repository.

Recognizing that engineering and computer science are making concerted efforts to increase the diversity of students in their academic programs and in the workforce, this multi-institutional research team proposes a two-pronged approach: (1) To provide scholarships to a diverse population of low-income academically talented students with financial need; and (2) to adapt, implement, and test a student experience model designed to increase the success of students in those fields. The primary disciplinary foci are Electrical, Computer, and Software Engineering (ECSE) with the inclusion of cyber-security at Iowa State University (ISU); Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) and Kirkwood Community College (KCC). The project plans to award scholarships to 272 students (100 unique scholars at Iowa State University; 90 unique scholars at Des Moines Area Community College; and 82 unique scholars at Kirkwood Community College.

The student experience model includes a set of well-established evidence-based practices that form an ecosystem of academic and co-curricular supports for students and is designed to foster retention, transfer, and graduation in STEM. The research team will conduct two research studies of this ecosystem of supports. The qualitative phenomenological study is designed to investigate and understand the development and maintenance of professional/career identity. The quantitative comparison study is designed to investigate the influence of individual motivation and the characteristics of the academic and social environments of ECSE on student success, retention, transfer, and degree attainment.

Electrical and computer engineering (ECE) technologies have evolved from simple electronics and computing devices and tools to complex systems that profoundly change the world we live in. Designing these complex systems requires not only technical knowledge and skills but also new ways of thinking and the development of social, professional and ethical responsibility. Through the RIDE project, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University is involving students, faculty, engineers and others in collaborative, inquiry-driven processes to collectively and systematically transform the department and the engineers it trains. Students are not only learning about fundamental ECE technologies in core courses during their sophomore and junior years (middle years), but also the socio-technical context to go beyond the hardware and software toward responsible development. Students are expanding their analysis and design skills to create solutions that work for individuals and society. To accomplish these goals, faculty are reshaping core curricula using evidence-based pedagogical strategies and are working together to enhance their understanding and integration of these strategies in courses. This work is being done through new structures for collaboration and facilitated through departmental change processes. The project is expected to advance scholarly teaching and education research department-wide; serve as a model for ECE, computing and engineering departments across the country; enhance the capacity to conduct engineering education research at Iowa State; develop a diverse, socio-technical-minded ECE workforce; and broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in ECE, especially women, through inclusive learning experiences.

Through this project, the ECE department is undergoing a transformation to a more agile, less traditional organization able to respond to industry and society needs and sustain innovations. This transformation is being driven by the project's novel cross-functional, collaborative instructional model for course design and professional formation, called X-teams. X-teams are reshaping the core technical ECE curricula in the middle years through pedagogical approaches that (a) promote design thinking, systems thinking, professional skills such as leadership, and inclusion; (b) contextualize course concepts; and (c) stimulate creative, socio-technical-minded development of ECE technologies for future smart systems. X-teams are also serving as change agents for the rest of the department through communities of practice referred to as Y-circles. Y-circles, comprised of X-team members, faculty, staff, and undergraduate and graduate students in the department, are contributing to an organizational culture that fosters and sustains innovations in engineering education through an agile framework that blends several documented change theories, including collaborative transformation, crucial conversations, and essential tension. Y-circles are engaging in a process of discovery and inquiry to bridge the engineering education research-to-practice gap. Research studies are being conducted to answer questions to understand (1) how educators involved in X-teams use design thinking to create new pedagogical solutions; (2) how professional formation pedagogy in the middle years affects student professional ECE identity development as design thinkers; (3) how ECE students overcome barriers, make choices, and persist along their educational and career paths in the middle years; and (4) the effects of department structures, policies, and procedures on faculty attitudes, motivation and actions. These studies are informing and improving project activities, advancing knowledge, and supporting adaptation by others.

This project will develop the ISART, the Iowa State Assessment of RCR Training, a validated assessment tool that can be used to measure the effectiveness of Responsible Conduct of Scientific Research (RCR) training methods. This project will use that tool to evaluate the effectiveness of online and in-person courses provided by colleges and universities nationally and globally. This assessment tool will enable users to compare and evaluate multiple and diverse alternative RCR training methods. Results from this assessment, will be used to specifically identify strengths and weaknesses of current RCR training methods in multiple contexts. The goal is to develop an instrument that will improve the quality of RCR training wherever it takes place, and ultimately to promote the ethical and responsible conduct of scientific research in all disciplines. This project will benefit students, scientific community, policy makers and administrators.

The development of the ISART will provide valuable assessment of RCR training to the community it serves. The ISART will be a validated and reliable concept inventory designed to measure expert-like thinking in the area of RCR. Researchers will first frame a precise specification of the instrument and the domain to be evaluated, and will then determine format, test procedures, and the characteristics of the target populations as part of the reliability parameters. Open-ended questions will be developed to measure progress in the nine core areas of interest for RCR training. These questions will be used to probe student understanding and misconceptions in the nine core areas. Commonly held misconceptions will be used as distractors when designing multiple choice concept inventory questions. Tests will be administered and data assessed over the course of several years to study both student knowledge acquisition and student retention of knowledge. Publication and dissemination of the ISART and the results of its application will provide the RCR training community with an appropriate, practical, and powerful tool to assess the effectiveness of their particular ethics training methods. The project will include both tool-development and a comparative study examining the impact of in-class vs. online modes of RCR education. This research has the potential to transform the course of graduate RCR education in STEM fields throughout the US and internationally.